Where Islam spreads, freedom dies

Moderate right-wing parties around Europe are engaged in a desperate search to find brown-skinned candidates willing to at least pretend to be conservatives. Warsi in Britain is one of the best known. Merkel's party in Germany has just its first Turk elected to the national parliament.

The problem with this plan is that conservatism is all about defending and preserving the essence of a people. But these brownskin candidates, as invaders in someone else's country, are necessarily infringing that essence, not preserving it. So the whole thing is a monstrous pretence. They are interested in defending their own people, not us. Now and then the mask slips.

For the Vienna parliamentary candidate Hasan Vural it was a home match. On the Sunday before last he appeared at the event of a Vienna association which provides care for immigrants from his home province in Turkey. Apart from the opening speaker, ÖVP [Austrian People's Party, mainstream right wing] regional secretary Manfred Juraczka, all guests spoke Turkish. The journalist Rusen Timur Aksak also sat in the audience.

What he heard left him speechless: ÖVP candidate Vural thundered against the youth welfare departments in red [Socialist] Vienna, which take children away from Muslim families to give them to Christian families "for racist reasons", and attacked the condom distribution action supported by the Greens as follows: "Why are condoms being distributed to Muslims? Are we not to have any more children?" Party leader Juraczka, for whom the passages have now been translated, said to Profil [the newspaper]: "I distance myself from these statements. If that happens again, Hasan Vural will have no place in the party."